A Compendium of Recent Academic Work Showing Negative Impacts of Immigration (Archive III)
Editor's Note: The Center published an updated version of this report in September 2023.
Introduction
Is there a scholarly consensus that immigration benefits all Americans? Listening to advocates and their allied media, one might assume so. Vox once ran this headline: “There's no evidence that immigrants hurt any American workers.” A writer for Forbes claimed that immigration restrictionists “are on the wrong side of history and the wrong side of social science”. Reason’s Shikha Dalmia has claimed that George Borjas is “literally the only economist of any repute who questions the economic benefits of immigration”.
The purpose of this compendium is to dispel such self-serving myths. The truth is that the costs and benefits of immigration are routinely measured, weighed, and debated in academic journals. No fair reading of the literature could conclude that immigration has only benefits — or only costs, for that matter. A 2016 review by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine demonstrated the mixed effects of immigration, as have dozens of studies appearing since that time. This compendium uses the National Academies as a starting point, then summarizes a sample of subsequently published papers that find costs associated with immigration. These papers address the labor market impact of immigration as well as broader effects.
The National Academies’ 2016 Review
Chapters 4 and 5 of the National Academies’ book-length report review the theoretical and empirical research on how immigration affects wages and employment. Anyone who takes the time to read this material will understand that immigration is costly to certain groups of Americans. For example, Table 5-2 from the report lists several major studies measuring immigration’s impact on wages. Notice the negative values in the “Wage Effect” column:
https://cis.org/archive/Compendium-Recent-Academic-Work-Showing-Negative-Impacts-Immigration-Archive-III
